Bernard Mandeville and Consumerism’s Buzz

Before Ayn Rand or Adam Smith, capitalism's prophet was the author of "The Fable of the Bees."

When addressing the right’s awkwardness surrounding issues of extreme economic inequality, it’s lately become almost de rigeur among conservative reformers to cite Adam Smith as a polestar that conservatives ought to follow. Or rather, they cite Smith’s little known work The Theory of Moral Sentiments, which many of them argue should be considered at least as important as his opus The Wealth of Nations.

Those who want to portray conservatives as ravenous fail to appreciate the yin and the yang that goes back to the beginning of fiscal conservatism. As I’ve noted before:‘Most educated Americans know Adam Smith wrote Wealth of Nations, expounding on the virtues of self-interest in free markets. But how many Americans know Smith’s first (and only other) book was called The Theory of Moral Sentiments — and that it was about the virtues of personal benevolence? Indeed, Smith developed a theory of an ‘impartial spectator‘ (a sort of conscience) as a standard for moral judgment.’

Limbaugh has obviously never read the Gospels. He has never read the parables. His ideology is so extreme it even trashes, because it does not begin to understand, the core principles of capitalism, as laid out by Adam Smith. Market capitalism is and always has been a regulated construction of government, not some kind of state of nature without it. Indeed without proper regulation to maintain a proper and fair and transparent market, it is doomed to terrible corruption, inefficiency, injustice, and abuse.

But there is a reason Ayn Rand is considered a gateway drug to the right and Smith isn’t—the “greed is good” ethos, whatever else may be wrong with it, is much sexier, more rebellious, and thus more appealing than staid bourgeois morality. But more to the point, it’s interesting that both Lewis and Sullivan consider Smith the fonset origo of fiscal conservatism, as defined by support for capitalism. I find it interesting because it’s mistaken, albeit a mistaken belief that is held almost universally.

Smith’s Wealth of Nations and Theory of Moral Sentiments were not the first popular defense of capitalism, nor was he even the first to explicitly develop the law of supply and demand. In some ways Smith’s oeuvre is a response to an earlier work, and I believe conservatives today have far more to learn from that first defense of capitalism, and its forgotten author, than they do from Smith.

So who is this forgotten political economist? The little-known Bernard Mandeville, who was most active in the early 18th century. Or rather, an author who is little known now. In his time, he influenced not only Smith (who mentions him by name in Wealth of Nations), but also Jean Jacques Rousseau and David Hume, among others.

Why have so few heard of him? Because his contemporaries actively suppressed his work, so pervasively did it scandalize the intelligentsia of the time. Protestant theologian John Wesley wrote of Mandeville, “till now I imagined there had never been in the world such a book as the works of Machiavel. But de Mandeville goes far beyond it.” In fact, Mandeville’s book was even presented as a public nuisance by the Grand Jury of Middlesex.

That book, The Fable of the Bees, has since been revived by libertarian outlets and put back on the market. Reading it now, one immediately sees why the world was not ready for it back in 1714. It was so radically ahead of its time that it reads like it was written by a time traveler who had visited modern Las Vegas. Its central thesis would probably raise hackles on both sides of the aisle today. Mandeville summed it up this way: “private vice makes public benefit.”

According to Mandeville, one couldn’t separate any benefit of capitalism, even private charity, from the supposed sins of pride and greed. Greed’s role is self-explanatory, but Mandeville arguably considered pride more important, because he believed it was what motivated acts of putative altruism. “Pride and vanity have built more hospitals than all the virtues together,” Mandeville writes in The Fable.

What’s more, Mandeville argued, consumerism and capitalism were completely synonymous and, in fact, it was the desire to consume more and better goods that prompted people to advance themselves in a capitalist society, not the desire for virtue. Thus, people who argued for a society where vice ceased to exist (many of whom, Mandeville often argued, represented the most hypocritically prideful of the lot), were actually arguing for an end to everything that made modern life possible and tolerable.

Needless to say, Mandeville’s work earned widespread condemnation at the time. Adam Smith spends some time trying to refute it in TheTheory of Moral Sentiments. Yet what most of Mandeville’s detractors missed (and, indeed, what distinguishes him from garden variety “greed is good” theorists like Ayn Rand) was that his background as a doctor of the nerves and stomach had given him an uncanny insight into the workings of peoples’ minds. Despite The Fable‘s chilly reception, Mandeville did attract at least one high-profile admirer—David Hume, arguably the greatest psychological political theorist of all time, according to political psychologist Jonathan Haidt.

In the 20th century, Ludwig von Mises praised Mandeville for “point[ing] out that self-interest and the desire for material well-being, commonly stigmatized as vices, are in fact the incentives whose operation make for welfare, prosperity and civilization.” Mises’s fellow Austrian Friedrich Hayek hailed Mandeville as the first man to come up with the idea of spontaneous order and described him as “a really great psychologist, if this is not too weak a term for a great student of human nature.”

And Mandeville certainly was a great student of human nature. If you read “The Grumbling Hive” today, it’s hard to believe that the author didn’t live in the age of Facebook and Miley Cyrus. While the notion that the desire to consume propels people toward economic ambition and upward mobility was controversial at the time, in a world that knows of the existence of Las Vegas and Macau, it’s almost trivial in its obviousness. The idea that vice can propel the economy, in a country where Miley Cyrus’s performance at the MTV Video Music Awards probably generated hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue for sites that linked to it (and more for Cyrus herself), is wholly unsurprising. Indeed, the idea that pride is a tool for moral enforcement is proven by every celebrity who’s had to apologize for an ill-considered tweet, by the neurotic culture of self-censorship on Facebook, and by the continued demands for video games with moral choice systems that reward players for making the right ones.

Moreover, Mandeville’s psychological lessons on the importance of pride are expounded by some of the most popular conservatives around the globe, as in the case of London mayor Boris Johnson invoking the spirit of Margaret Thatcher to warn about constrained economic mobility. Mandeville’s warnings that morally zealous people could imperil modern society now sound too prescient, both at home and abroad.

Unlike Smith, Mandeville’s moral vision needs no updating, but instead treats every element of the modern world as an accomplishment to be celebrated, rather than a collection of vices to be ignored or overcome. His work carries a timeless key to the human psyche.

Adam Smith ties are a nice fashion accessory, but if conservatives want to speak to the modern world, they’d better start humming the same tune as Mandeville’s busy little bees.

Mytheos Holt is an associate policy analyst at the R Street Institute, and communications strategist at Mair Strategies.

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24 Responses to Bernard Mandeville and Consumerism’s Buzz

I have read Smith’s two books, but not anything by Mandeville. However, going on the description above, I do perceive one striking similarity between their writings: both wrote about human behavior in descriptive, rather than prescriptive, terms. This sets them apart from writers such as Kant or Rand who devise more or less believable logical structures purporting to show how humans should act, rather than showing or purporting to show how they actually do.

Funny that market libertarians consider themselves a ‘rebellious’ group––as per von Mises’ “self-interest and the desire for material well-being, commonly stigmatized as vices,”––lashing out at the ‘bourgeois morality’ which believes in virtue. Sorry to bust your bubble, but libertarian values ARE bourgeois morality these days (as this article points out). Mandeville may have been rebellious in his time, but von Mises surely wasn’t, and today it’s much more ‘rebellious’ to believe in traditional morality, which rejects self-interest and material consumption as vices, far more destructive than any ‘moral zealotry’ could ever be, because far more pervasive and dominant as social values.

Mr Holt is absolutely right – Mises and Hayek are indebted to Mandeville’s thought; and there is no argument, that today, American capitalism has morphed into consumerism. For those conservatives who esteem Hayek, liberty and prosperity mean replacing two important Biblical virtues in favor of unadulterated self-interest; namely solidarity (a concern for the overall welfare of a community), and altruism (a charitable and self-sacrificing disposition toward one’s neighbors.) In the Fatal Conceit, Hayek remarks, “It is these two instincts, deeply imbedded in our purely instinctive or intuitive reactions, which remained the great obstacle to the development of the modern economy.” It is an open question whether a culture that is so devoted to mainstreaming greed, selfishness, and lust can be called a free republic.

This article strikes me as profoundly intellectually lazy, and, if it does Mandeville any justice, he must have been quite the lazy type, too. There is a huge difference between someone who sees shades of gray in the world and someone who holds that there is no such thing as good or bad (and that, if there were a difference, what is bad would really be good!).

It’s really hard to know where to start with someone who believes that Miley Cyrus and Las Vegas are engines of economic prosperity. Suffice it to say that no special genius is required to take these kinds of positions– they are provocative and self-justifying, and so will always attract a certain number of mildly clever, ambitious people.

The prospect of seeing Miley Cyrus twerking as the definitive motivator getting people out of bed and to work in the morning — wow, that may be the most ridiculous unsubstantiated claim I’ve read in any article on social structure.

No, Mr. Holt, that is not why I spend my long hours at the desk. (And I happen to like some of Cyrus’ songs.)

And, BTW, I suggest that Mr. Holt would benefit from spending some time “analyzing” Hayek’s later writings. Just as Holt selectively parses Mandeville and Smith to make a jolly weekend blog post, Hayek is selectively parsed to provide middleweight policy analysts with talking points for think tank press releases. The author of The Constitution of Liberty would have nothing to do with the claptrap issuing from “Hayek enthusiasts.”

Some libertarians and associated meme artists display an incessant need to redefine vice and virtue so that virtue becomes vice and vice becomes virtue. I don’t get it, really. Are you so misanthropic that you just can’t stand to be in the same room with the idea that kindness, thoughtfulness and helpfulness have beneficial social and economic consequences? Then, get help and get it now. You, and everybody around you, will be the happier for it. Your books will sell better, too.

Reinhold
I do not speak on behalf of libertarians, and do not know what every libertarian thinks, but I am guessing that trying to be in the rebellious group is not what motivates most of them. When it comes to the bourgeois, I am not aware of many libertarian voices that lash out at bourgeois morality, that seems more of a left wing concern.

You may not like it, but Miley Cyrus and Las Vegas do provide economic benefits, even for the poor that you think are being ignored by the vice seekers. People who do not care for their neighbors are not going to start doing so because gambling is banned, having these things provides job opportunities. What do think is more important to a down on his luck poor guy, a potential job or whether twerking should be censored ?

“You may not like it, but Miley Cyrus and Las Vegas do provide economic benefits, even for the poor that you think are being ignored by the vice seekers.”
This is not a reply to me, but to the article, because I did not express any opinion re: twerking or gambling. I have sometimes bet on the horse races, if you must know.
“I am guessing that trying to be in the rebellious group is not what motivates most of them.”
Well, perhaps it doesn’t motivate them, but I did quote von Mises just above saying that he believed “self-interest” and “material well-being” to be “commonly stigmatized as vices,” suggesting he thought that he held uncommon values; and on libertarian/Austrian blogs, I notice rebellious posturing whenever there is mention of ‘mainstream economics,’ since they seem to believe themselves to be a radical alternative to the status quo (even though Milton Friedman was pushing the same crap forever ago and had major influence on American economic policy, at home and abroad).

Being ancient does not make an evil venerable, merely ancient. It is still evil…
For those who prize something above the Almighty Holy Market, there can be no praise for Mandeville. And there IS something above the market. Something transcendent. But something which libertarians can never acknowledge. It is the Source of morality. And that source is not found in economic knavery. It is left as an exercise for the student to figure out just what that Source is.

Given Mr Holt’s first name, I bet he knows that Hesiod addressed this very topic around 700 BC in Works and Days, naming what we might call productive greed/pride, good Strife.

“So, after all, there was not one kind of Strife alone, but all over the earth there are two. As for the one, a man would praise her when he came to understand her; but the other is blameworthy: and they are wholly different in nature. For one fosters evil war and battle, being cruel: her no man loves; but perforce, through the will of the deathless gods, men pay harsh Strife her honour due. But the other is the elder daughter of dark Night, and the son of Cronos who sits above and dwells in the aether, set her in the roots of the earth: and she is far kinder to men. She stirs up even the shiftless to toil; for a man grows eager to work when he considers his neighbour, a rich man who hastens to plough and plant and put his house in good order; and neighbour vies with is neighbour as he hurries after wealth. This Strife is wholesome for men. And potter is angry with potter, and craftsman with craftsman, and beggar is jealous of beggar, and minstrel of minstrel.”

It has been and always will be the Christian ethos that holds capitalistic vices in check. Without it, we will be fighting a losing battle against human vice and fallen nature. The Christian faith is our national reservoir public morality and has been since the Arabella landed on our shores.
To say that capitalism can regulate itself based on self interest is a “house divided” and ignores the “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God”. To imply that self interests will somehow regulate itself for the good of the whole is Progressive thought and holds no prescriptive hope for America Conservatives.

Freidrich Hayek,
“The assurance of a certain minimum income for everyone, or a sort of floor below which nobody need fall even when he is unable to provide for himself, appears not only to be a wholly legitimate protection against a risk common to all, but a necessary part of the Great Society in which the individual no longer has specific claims on the members of the particular small group into which he was born.”

It’s always troubling to see a historic work stripped of its context and re-rendered in the context of the present day. That’s true whether the piece in question is The Bible, The Prince, or The Wealth of Nations.

Rendering these works culture-free and thus subject to our own place and time guarantees misapprehending them, and often results in wielding them in ways that are contradictory to the author’s intent.

Smith, for example, saw greed as true but not good. The idea that he praised greed as good is laughable, especially as he goes to great lengths to discuss the restraint of greed so that it does not destroy everything. Smith knew what Holt apparently does not: “The wages of sin is death.”

It takes a particular form of scholarship to ignore historical context and re-render the past in the light of an era’s faddish beliefs. It is how liberals came to see the Bible as endorsing socialism, and how libertarians came to see Smith as endorsing greed.

Chris 1 and others have made some very incisive remarks concerning Mandeville.

It would behoove anyone who has read Fable of the Bees (or any other work, for that matter) to learn to discern how to understand not only immediate sense of the words, but also contextualize the author and discern her or his full intentions.

To extrapolate and make into an axiom ‘private vice contributes to public benefit’ is fallacious. Some vices may, but surely not all. And some portion of the public may benefit, but not necessarily all.

After all, Mandeville seems to acknowledge these very facts by stating:

“So Vice is beneficial found,
When it’s by Justice lopt and bound.” (1,37)

Really now, even though some self-proclaimed partisans of ‘Reason’ and ‘libertarianism’ love to harp on the aforementioned shallow cliché and absolutize it into an axiom for personal and social action, they fail utterly to consider specifics concerning what justice is, and also whose justice and rationality can establish whether and which ‘bounds’ (as Mandeville well remarks) should be established upon vice to gauge its benefits or non-benefits to any, a few, or all.

Only the shallowest of utilitarian consequentialists would shun such considerations.

It may be that greed, materialism and self interest lead to a stronger economy, but these aren’t the vices the GOP generally scolds.

There are other vices too, such as laziness, a sense of entitlement, hedonism, lack of pride, and ungoverned lust leading to out of wedlock births to young unskilled women, that do the very opposite of building the economy: these vices creates an entire class of helpless and dysfunctional people who can do very little but take from that economy and the common good.

But Jove, with Indignation moved,
At last in Anger swore, he’d rid
The bawling Hive of Fraud, and did.
The very Moment it departs,
And Honesty fills all their Hearts;
This results in a rapid loss of prosperity, though the newly virtuous hive does not mind:
For many Thousand Bees were lost.
Hard’ned with Toils, and Exercise
They counted Ease it self a Vice;
Which so improved their Temperance;
That, to avoid Extravagance,
They flew into a hollow Tree,
Blest with Content and Honesty.
The poem ends in a famous phrase:
Bare Virtue can’t make Nations live
In Splendor; they, that would revive
A Golden Age, must be as free,
For Acorns, as for Honesty.
-Mandeville

Strange how much those honest bees sound like the puritans. Maybe Mandeville thought America wouldn’t amount to much.

It’s interesting to note that both sets of virtue/vices are productive in some form.

A bit like relying pre Galilean science to fly a space ship- 2-300 years ago the idea that the same system of vice driven consumerism would wreck every ecosphere on the planet probably wasn’t much on anyones lips- it’s a fascinating theory, but can’t account for much these days.